Degree Programs

• MA Program

• PhD Program

• August Orientation Session

The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture is a graduate institute of Bard College that opened in New York City in 1993. Today the BGC offers two programs of study, one leading to a master of arts degree and the other to a doctor of philo-sophy degree. Students in these programs can select from a wide array of courses dealing with various aspects of the cultural history of the material world.

Students in the MA and PhD programs take the same courses, although their programs are articulated in different ways. The curric­ulum for the master’s degree includes a number of required courses, tutorials, independent studies, travel, and internships in fields chosen by the student in consultation with a faculty adviser.

Students are otherwise free to construct their own program of study (with their adviser’s help). The BGC has areas of special strength—in New York and American Material Culture; History and Theory of Museums; Modern Design History; Early Modern Europe; Comparative Medieval Material Culture (China, Islam, Europe); and Archaeology, Anthropology, and Material Culture. But specialization in one of these areas is neither required nor necessarily encouraged for MA students. Doctoral candidates, by contrast, may wish to con­centrate more and work in close collaboration with faculty advisers to craft a slate of electives in preparation for qualifying examinations and the dissertation.

In addition to formal classes, the BGC runs a series of evening colloquia designed to function in a kind of polyphony with the “for credit” course offerings. This fifth “course” is designed to avoid the peril that besets small fields and small institutions that become too comfortable and set standards that are too easily met. By bringing in interesting scholars from across the world of learning who ask ques­tions that we have not posed or that are about things we do not study, the BGC ensures that our students’ horizons are as broad as possible and that our standard of excellence is as high as possible. Regular evening seminars, which are open to the academic public, serve as foci for the BGC’s areas of strength. In addition, the History and Theory ofMuseums program brings in speakers affiliated with current exhibitions. Endowed lecture series feature a regular sequence of speakers on 18th- and 19th-century France, on Islamic art and material culture, and on the history of glass. A monthly faculty work-in-progress seminar helps create and further house discourse. Every May the BGC participates, as the founding organizer, in the Consortium for American Material Culture, along with Yale University, Boston University, the University of Delaware, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Smithsonian Institution, and our local partners at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New-York Historical Society. Symposia build on these interests and connect to the wider scholarly world while at the same time representing the apex of a vertically integrated program that begins in the classroom, continues through the seminar, and cul­minates, via the symposium, in a publication.

In 2009–2010, to celebrate the return to our expanded academic center, we organized a cycle of symposia: “Thalassography and Historiography” in October; “Cultural Histories of the Material World” in January; “History and New Media” in February; “Secondhand Culture” in April; “Keywords Toward a New History of Decorative Arts and Material Culture” with the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in May; and “Rethinking Material Culture: From the Americas” with the Fundación Cisneros, also in May. Plans for 2010–11 include a scholars day centering on the Knoll exhibition opening in January in our reno­vated Main Gallery, another devoted to the exhibition on Northwest Coast objects, launching our new Focus Gallery, and symposia on the Liao (jointly organized with Yale) and the ex voto across the centuries and globe.

The hands-on examination of objects is an essential feature of study at the BGC. Incorporated into the first-year Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture have been our “Materials Days,” events that focus on the making of things so that students can experience materiality from the maker’s perspective. In the past, students have made sugar sculptures for the dining table with Ivan Day, an internationally acclaimed expert on the history of gastronomy, and spent a day visiting 17th-century archaeological digs in Brooklyn and an archaeology laboratory at Brooklyn College. More recent visits have included papermaking at a New York studio and a field trip to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut. This year, we extend this idea with a whole course center­ing on art, design, and craft makers, with regular guests coming to the BGC to demonstrate design and craft-making.

Our award-winning exhibition program allows students to learn about a range of artifacts and meanings and to better understand how exhibitions and galleries function. “Scholars Days” in the gallery bring together professors, curators, and connoisseurs in an informal but rigorous context and thus serve as a model for the kind of intellectual profile we believe in. In addition to what we offer in-house, students have access to collections and curators at a variety of museums in the New York metropolitan area, including the Brooklyn Museum, the New-York Historical Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the New York Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Hispanic Society of America, and Historic Hudson Valley. Auction houses, conservation studios, and commercial galleries also provide students with direct contact with objects.

Advising is an important part of the BGC’s graduate training. Upon admission, every student is assigned a faculty adviser who works closely with him or her, helping to plan a course of study, offering aca­demic counseling, guiding the student toward professional activity and visibility, and, in a variety of ways, supporting and encouraging the student’s attainment of intellectual and vocational goals. In addition, each student has a specialist supervisor for his or her MA Qualifying Paper or PhD dissertation.

Graduates of the BGC’s degree programs are prepared for careers or career advancement in academia, museums, historic houses, galleries, auction houses, corporate art management, and government agencies, as well as in the fields of research, consulting, publishing, and commu­nications. Some recent BGC graduates are holding positions as curators at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New-York Historical Society; the National Gallery of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Arts and Design; the Allentown Art Museum; and Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.